The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality

by Amanda Montell

fall of Rome in 476 AD to Martin Luther’s birth in 1483. “We invent so much about the Middle Ages partially because it’s the pond between ancient and modern times,” Janega explained. Close enough in history to feel familiar, but long ago and far away enough to retain mystery, medieval Europe provides the perfect backdrop for both romanticization and nightmare—fairy princessesI and torture chambers.II

A 5 percent increase might sound fairly low, but consider that Facebook and Google, the world’s two biggest news distribution platforms, have featured questionable and even full-blown conspiratorial headlines in their trending news sections. When “participants” are in the millions, and the “study” is real life, it’s no wonder America’s sense of truth has crumbled like medieval ruins.

Mould’s study found that contemporary leftists were more than happy to call out white “corporate welfare” bros or working-class rural folks on farm subsidies, and that these commentaries were supposed to be progressive as they subverted the stereotype that someone on welfare must be a single mother of color. “The problem was they weren’t really doing anything to suggest that wasn’t the case, all they were doing was adding new people to the definition of ‘welfare queen,’ ” said Mould. “We

Studies have shown that people perceive information as more believable when presented in easy-to-read fonts and/or easy-to-understand speech styles. A crowd favorite is rhyme. In contemporary studies of the so-called rhyme-as-reason effect, researchers found that participants generally rate the phrase “woes unite foes” as more truthful than “woes unite enemies” and “misfortunes unite foes,” even though they all mean the same thing.

that seems to make the message itself more sensible. Rhyming “purifies the basics” of our highly complicated world, Harvard psycholinguist Dr. Steven Pinker once said. It brings order to the informational chaos out there. Needless to say, we find this pleasurable.

Research finds that laughter and disgust are among the emotional responses most likely to make a piece of information both persuasive and shareable.VI Laughter and disgust—the exact two reactions my medieval bath story elicited.

one more reason why so much mythology surrounds the Middle Ages: It was the dawn of modern-day anxiety.

Budding ideas of self-creation clashed with life’s erratic zigzags, and this discord cracked open a geyser of untapped anxiety. “Generations would later call it existential angst,” Dennis-Tiwary said.